When your pension is a hedge.
by Claire Witz
/1. The Penshurst Place Problem:
I want topiary, not responsibility (and this is also about my pension).
I live in Royal Tunbridge Wells, which means I’m surrounded by the sort of gardens that make you want to swan about in a floaty dress with a clever looking book you’re not really reading.
Penshurst Place is the big one for me. Those hedges. The topiary. The little pathways and well-placed benches that look like they were designed specifically for romantic daydreaming and dramatic sighing. You can wander, you can sit, you can stare into the middle distance and think Important Thoughts.
I’m convinced I should have been born to that kind of life. Not in an entitled way. In a ‘there’s been a clerical error somewhere’ way. Because in my head, my natural habitat is not “middle-aged woman in comfortable (but obviously stylish(ish)) shoes picking up dog poo”. It’s “woman of leisure with a team of gardeners and a penchant for mildly absurd topiary”.
And yet.
/2. The reality: a 50ft garden and a dog with opinions
My actual garden is about 50ft long and is mostly used by Daisy-the-dog as a toilet. There’s no topiary. No perfectly clipped yew hedges. No sweeping gravel paths. There’s… grass (sometimes), a deck, and a fine variety of weeds.
And here’s the key detail: I am not even vaguely interested in gardening.
I like gardens. In fact I love gardens. I love the idea of gardens. What I don’t love is gardening. Because gardening requires patience. Planning. Waiting. Nurturing. Long-term vision. The slow reward of things growing.
And I need instant gratification. I want the “after” photo without the “before” photo. I want the mature wisteria without the ten years of looking at a sad stick and pretending it’s “coming along nicely”. I want to sit in a beautiful garden. I do not want to create a beautiful garden.
This, as you can imagine, is a bone of contention between my husband and me. Because I just want to sit in it… which means he has to be my “gardener” whether he likes it or not. I quite respect him for not telling me to stick it where the sun doesn't shine when I say things like, “Could you just make it more… stately-home-ish?” while contributing absolutely nothing except "vibes". Gardening is my pension in plant form.
And this, dear reader, is exactly how I treat my pension. Gardening and pensions have the same fatal flaw - you have to do sensible things now that pay off later. And I don’t like later. Later is boring. Later is abstract. Later is Future Claire’s problem. Except Future Claire is real, and she would like a word.
If you’re the kind of person who enjoys researching pension funds, reviewing performance, and doing regular contributions with cheerful consistency, I genuinely envy you. My brain does not work like that. My brain works like:
“Is this interesting right now?”
“Will I get a payoff within a week?”
“Can I have some chocolate raisins from M&S?”
Pensions are the financial equivalent of planting a hedge and waiting eight years to feel smug over the giant peacock it has been trained into. I am not a smug-waiting person.
/3. The pension admin confession (don’t tell Doug)
In fact, I’ll tell you how bad I am at pension admin.
We moved house in 2006. I only realised a couple of years ago that I’d never told one of my workplace pensions about the new address. So all the letters had been going to the old address for 18 years. Yes, eighteen years.
Somewhere, the current occupants of that house have probably been receiving polite pension updates for nearly two decades and thinking, who is this woman and why is she so committed to not sorting her life out?
When I finally updated the address and the letters started coming to me again, I did what any responsible adult would do - I opened the envelopes, glanced vaguely at the numbers on the first page, got bored, and put them straight in the filing cabinet, where they continue to be ignored.
(And yes, Doug - if you’re reading this, I have always been organised and proactive, and that filing cabinet is a place of robust financial decision-making. Definitely.)
/4. Why it’s so hard to care about your future self.
I think part of the problem is that saving for retirement doesn’t feel like “doing something”. It feels like “not doing something”. You don’t get a visible result. There’s no satisfying before-and-after. No perfectly clipped ball atop a pyramid. No finished border. No immediate, well, anything.
It’s money quietly leaving your life and going into a folder labelled “for later”, which is exactly where my brain sends things to die.
And it’s the same emotional resistance as gardening:
It’s slow.
It requires consistency.
You can’t rush it.
It involves responsibility.
It feels a bit… grown-up.
I mean, I am grown-up and I do lots of very grown up things. I just don’t always fancy behaving like one.
/5. The fantasy lifestyle I’m saving for (kind of)
But here’s the truth: I do have a clear retirement vision. It’s just not spreadsheets and sensible shoes. It’s this:
I want the kind of lifestyle where I can visit vast gardens and pretend they’re mine.
I want to have membership cards and favourite tearoom tables and a casual relationship with the gift shop. I want to wander around places like Penshurst Place as if I’m merely “checking on things” before returning to my estate.
I want to sit on a bench, daydream, and live out my very specific fantasy of being born to great things - if there hadn’t been an administrative error somewhere.
In short, I want the outcome (beautiful garden / comfortable retirement / soft, floaty life with tea and topiary), but I struggle with the input (gardening / pension contributions / boring admin).
I want Future Me to have the good stuff. But Present Me would like a dopamine hit and a sit down.
So what do I do with this?
If you were hoping this blog would end with a neat list of pension tips and a gardening plan… it won’t.
Because if you want pension advice (or gardening advice), definitely don’t speak to me. Speak to someone like Chancery Lane – for pension advice at any rate - they are considerably better at it, and more interested in it, than I’ll ever be. (See me as The Cautionary Tale. I’m the person waving from the patio, saying, “I really should sort that,” while actively not sorting it.)
But maybe there’s something useful in that too. Because I suspect loads of us - especially women who’ve stepped out of corporate life, worked part-time, had kids, gone self-employed, and spent years prioritising everyone else - have a similar relationship with long-term planning. We’re good at dealing with the now. The urgent. The immediate. The hollers of "Muuuuuuuuuuum". The practical chaos. We’re less good at planting the metaphorical hedge.
/6. The ending I’m working towards
I don’t think I’ll ever become someone who enjoys pensions. Or someone who finds joy in pruning.
But I can become someone who does the basics anyway, for the simple reason that I want a future that feels calm and lovely.
A future with enough security to let me drift around grand gardens in Kent, pretending they’re mine.
And if the universe is listening, I’d also like the team of gardeners. Just in case there’s still time to correct that clerical error.
Photograph: Sophia Spring / The Observer